My RAC project with Openfiler, part I – Openfiler

My current job doesn’t offer me at the moment the opportunity to play with RAC or other stuff, so I decided to build my own RAC on my Windows7-desktop (64-bits, 8GB RAM), using 3 VM’s (VM-workstation , 7.1.3 build-324285) :

2 VM’s (VMware, not OracleVM!) for two RAC-nodes, based on OEL 5.5, 11.2.0.2 for infra and database.

1 VM as my own storage, based on Openfiler 2.3 (free) and ASM as storage manager.

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Powered by rPath Linux, Openfiler is a free browser-based network storage management utility that delivers file-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) and block-based Storage Area Networking (SAN) in a single framework. Openfiler supports CIFS, NFS, HTTP/DAV, FTP, however, we will only be making use of its iSCSI capabilities to implement an inexpensive SAN for the shared storage components required by Oracle RAC 11g. A 500GB internal hard drive will be connected to the network storage server (sometimes referred to in this article as the Openfiler server) through an internal embedded SATA II controller. The Openfiler server will be configured to use this disk for iSCSI based storage and will be used in our Oracle RAC 11g configuration to store the shared files required by Oracle Clusterware as well as all Oracle ASM volumes.

2. Create a VM with OpenFiler.

Decided not to use the applicance, but install Openfiler with the iso-file, and later on add a disk of 80 GB (/dev/sdb) for configuring my ASM-based shared storage. On that disk I’ll create a volume group of 80 GB. You can also choose to create more separate disks and then create 1 volume group to span those disks.

Now we will create a Volume Group. This volume group will be named ‘racdbvg’ and will contan the newly created primary partition of 80GB.

3.4 Create a Volume Group

Click on Volumes – tab, you will get:

Fill in ‘racdbvg’ in volume group name, click on the checkbox of the partition of 80GB and click on ‘Add Volume Group’.

Next step is to create ‘logical volumes’ in this Volume Group (racdbvg):

3.5 Create logical volumes

Remember the planning of the disks, see the last column :

Storage

Filesystem

Volume size

ASM name

ASM redundancy

Openfiler Volume name

OCR/Voting disk

ASM

2GB (2208M)

+CRS

External

Racdb_crs1

DB-files

ASM

39GB (39840M)

+RACDB_DATA

External

Racdb_data1

Fast Rec.area

ASM

39GB (39840M)

+FRA

External

Racdb_fra1

Navigate to Volume-tab:

Click ‘Add Volume’

Fill in the name of the volume, size and filesystem (iSCSI) for all three volumes.

Result:

These volumes are the iSCSI disks that can be presented to our iSCSI clients (racnode1 and racnode2) on the network.

Unfortunately we are not finished yet. The iSCSI clients are still not able to access / ‘see’ the drives. We have to create iSCSI targets for each of the three volumes, and map the iSCSI target to the volumes (so-called ‘LUN-mapping’).

Steps for each of the volumes (three times!)

– Create a unique Target IQN = the name for the new iSCSI target.

– Map one of the created volumes to that Target IQN

– Grant both of the Oracle RC nodes access to the new iSCSI target.

3.6 Create a unique Target IQN

Target IQN

iSCSI Volume Name

Volume description

Iqn.2006-01.com.openfiler:racdb.crs1

Racdb-crs1

ASM CRS Vol1

Iqn.2006-01.com.openfiler:racdb.data1

Racdb-data1

ASM Data Vol1

Iqn.2006-01.com.openfiler:racdb.fra1

Racdb-fra1

ASM FRA Vol1

Navigate in the Volume-tab to iSCSI-targets:

A name is generated , like this: iqn.2006-01.com.openfiler:tsn.4c0aa6d6d32a .

For better understanding, change this to iqn.2006-01.com.openfiler:racdb.crs1 like this:

Click ‘add’. You get a page to modify some settings for this target. Didn’t change anything.

Then click on the LUN-mapping (grey sub-tab). Be sure it’s the right iSCSI-target you’re in.

Click on ‘map’ for the specific target.

Now we need to grant the two-RAC nodes acces to the new iSCSI targets through the storage (private) network.

Click on ‘network ACL’ in the grey sub-tab.

Allow acces for the rac1-priv and rac2-priv. Click ‘update’.

Perform this three times.

Now we are done for the moment. The storage is ready for the rac-nodes. More in part II.

Dear Sai, long time ago, but you will have to make some sort of networkplan, and choose the IP-numbers you want to use. Use static IP-numbers, not DHCP generated numbers, and configure this in Linux – network configuration files.